Sunday, October 20, 2013

Vanport City and the flood that washed it away

It seemed
like everything was moving in America between 1940 and 1945. Nearly a third of its 1940 population was
headed somewhere else. The military
would recruit, train and position 15 million people, 11.5 million overseas. Back in the USA, another 15 million civilians made a major
move to other counties and states. In those five years, the populations of
California, Oregon and Washington grew by over 3,000,000 people as the country
armed itself in the new defense industries built or expanded on the west coast.

People who
lived in rural America found themselves crowding into urban America, making the
kind of money they could never make at home.
Real income rose 40%. In 1943
alone, 700,000 African Americans moved from the South and 120,000 of them settled
in Los Angeles. More than 160,000
workers came to Oregon during the war years, most of them landing in the
shipyards built and owned by Henry J. Kaiser Corporation. They were recruited
from all over the country, brought by special 17 car trains known as Kaiser
Karavans.

Vast sums
of money were on the move as well. In
1940, the federal government was spending nearly $10 billion/year and its defense spending was $1.66 billion. In 1943,
defense spending was $44 billion, nearly 70% of federal spending. In 1945, 90% of federal revenues were going to
defense, a total of $65 billion.

The income
tax was extended to nearly all American wage earners, bringing in $45 billion
annually in 1945 compared to $8.5 billion in 1939 and the new payroll deduction
brought the money in more quickly. More
than $185 billion dollars were raised in the form of War Bonds, purchased in a
frenzy of events between 1940 and 1945.
They would fund more than half the total cost of the war.

Materials
that were necessary for the war relentlessly changed hands. Rubber, paper, aluminum, steel were used,
returned, piled up and taken away for processing. Shopping was often an exchange, people buying
some things, handing back others. At the
butcher shop, for example, fats were collected and later processed into glycerin
for use as high explosives. Ten pounds
of fat made one pound of glycerin.

The
shipyards in Portland, abounding in Kaiser’s manufacturing process innovations,
seemed like a motion picture speeded up – a ship coming out in 244 days, then
40, then 10, then four and a half. Along
with shipyards in California, Kaiser produced nearly 1,500 Liberty Ships in
three years.

Where to
put all these people when they weren’t working was a colossal problem. Production fell off
when a war worker could

not get a good night’s rest, could not find daycare for
a child or did not have enough room for the family. The problem in Portland was particularly
acute since the Housing Authority of Portland and the city’s Realty Board were averse
to building public housing within the city and the Portland Realty Board had
drawn strict, red lines around areas where African Americans could either buy or
rent.

Oregon had
few African Americans because the constitution of the state originally forbade them to
live there. The constitution prohibited
in-migration of African Americans, did not allow them ownership of real estate
and denied them the right to sue in court.
While the 14th and 15th Amendments to the national
constitution voided the language, it remained in Oregon’s constitution until 1927.

There was a
small black community of about 2,000 people located mostly where Memorial
Coliseum stands today and attitudes of many Portlanders wanted to keep the footprint of African Americans small.

A petition from the people living in the north end community of Albina, where a handful of African Americans were moving in pre-war, let the City Council know how they felt:"If it is necessary to bring in large numbers of Negro workers, locate them on the edge of the city. If they are allowed to fan out through the city it soon will be necessary to station a policeman on every corner."

Kaiser is second from left, Oregon Governor Charles
Sprague is with him in backseat on 1943 visit by FDR

Kaiser was
a restless person who didn’t wait for others to solve the problems that got in
the way of his contracts. Concerned
about lost time on the Hoover Dam project, he created a pre-paid health plan,
Kaiser Permanente, that kept more of his workers healthy and on the job. So, in Portland, his company purchased 650 acres
along the Columbia River and began construction of a federally funded public
housing project outside the city limits at a place called Vanport City.

Kaiser and
his brother, Edgar, did most things on a big scale and always in a hurry. Vanport would become the largest public
housing project in the country, home to 40,000 people. Built with products that were not essential to the war, it was flimsy. It had wood foundations and only the sparest amenities. The windows didn’t open. There were ice boxes, not refrigerators

and ice
was unavailable on site until 1943. A
hot plate provided the cooking and also some of the heating. There was one clothes washing machine for
every 28 units. Construction of Vanport
housing was a three shift, 24 hour job. Construction
began in August of 1942 and people started moving in by December. The noise and
lights of construction made sleep difficult for the first residents. The
Oregonian newspaper took to calling it “Zoomtown.”
There were 6,000 kids from 46 states crammed into Zoomtown. Both parents usually worked and the schools
took on additional responsibilities for child care.

There were
many discomforts –the mud, the bugs, the vermin, the plastic hotplate knobs
always melting off, the pervasive fear of fire – all led people to want to get
out. In 1944, 100 people a week were
leaving as they found better housing, and not all were replaced.

Manley Maben, the expert on daily life in
Vanport, describes an additional sense of unease, life in a bowl, surrounded
by dikes 15-25 feet high, blotting out the horizon for nearly everyone. When the
war ended, Vanport took on another temporary function.

“Welfare recipients were
concentrated there; income-adjusted rents were adopted; large numbers of
veterans moved into the area's only available housing (many as college
students) and the proportion of black residents rose markedly. But it was still
the same impermanent, concentrated project, only older. Its residents still
regarded their stay there as temporary, although not as transitory as its
wartime population did. Fewer women worked, and being cooped up in Vanport was
particularly trying to them. To the very end, life in Vanport remained a
unique, and for many, a distressing experience.”

Post
war business in the Pacific Northwest turned its attentions and engineering
know-how to the Columbia River, the great 1243 mile long river they shared with
Canada. Today, the Columbia River is the
most dammed basin the world, home to over 400 dams. But, as the war wound down, there were just
three dams on the main stem of the Columbia River. Rock Island Dam, the first, completed in 1933. Bonneville, the second, in 1938. Grand Coulee was completed in 1941. Several others were in the pipeline on the US
side, but none in British Columbia.

The
Columbia drains a region the size of France and falls rapidly into the sea, at
two feet/mile, giving the river its hydroelectric punch. Most of the land is on the US side, about
85%. However, much of the water is
stored in the form of snow in the high elevations of British Columbia. In average water conditions, British Columbia
provides 30% of Columbia’s flow.
However, in high water conditions, British Columbia provides nearly half
the water in the river. Water conditions
are extremely variable. The natural or “virgin flow” of the Columbia can be as
little as 30,000 cubic feet/second, about the average annual flow of the
Willamette River, and as much as 1,240,000 cubic feet/second at its highest
flow, the one that flooded downtown Portland in 1894.

Post
war, Canada and the US turned their attention to a basic business deal. Create value upriver by storing and releasing
water in Canada to provide flood control and electricity downstream. The simple idea ran into difficult boundary
politics, so a deal had to wait 15 years for attitudes to change enough to allow
it.

In
the meantime, the 20,000 or so African Americans who came to Portland during
the war soon shrunk to 10,000, about 5,000 now living in Vanport, its
population now at 18,000 people. To
accommodate the many veterans living there, Oregon State College created an
extension in Vanport that enrolled nearly 2,000 students in its first year,
1946. Over time, it became today’s
Portland State University. Most of the
remaining African American population was now moving into the Albina neighborhood
in north Portland. As they moved in,
whites were moving out, including a unique immigrant population of

Trinity Lutheran Church

Volga River
Germans who had fled the Russian Steppes in the early 1880s, 1890s and the beginning of the new 20th century. They left their distinctive churches and
bungalows. Still surrounded by the red lines
of the Portland Realty Board, 5,000 African Americans were living in Albina at war's end.

There
was a heavy snow pack accumulating in 1948 throughout the mountains along the
Columbia River and its tributaries. Once
the snow stopped, it remained cool in the watershed, delaying the gradual snow
melt managers of the hydroelectric system like to see. Then a warm spell settled in – 75 degrees on
May 15. The next Thursday it was 78, the
following Sunday still 78, then 85 on Monday.
The whole next week was over 70 degrees and Spokane hit 84 in on both
Saturday and Sunday. When it wasn’t hot,
there was a warm rain.

The
snow pack fell off the mountains as never before. Over a million cubic feet/second was
streaming down the river as the Memorial Day holiday approached. The engineers employed by the Housing
Authority of Portland stepped up their inspections of the dikes surrounding the
project, starting round-the-clock patrols on May 25, a day the river rose dramatically. On the evening of May 29th, the
Housing Authority met to discuss options including evacuation. Early the next morning, about 4 AM on Memorial
Day, Housing Authority of Portland workers slipped a note under each door of the
remaining residents. After stating that
the engineers had been keeping a constant watch on the dikes, the note concluded:

REMEMBER:

DIKES ARE SAFE AT
PRESENT

YOU WILL BE WARNED IF
NECESSARY

YOU WILL HAVE TIME TO
LEAVE

DON’T GET EXCITED

There
were several eyewitnesses to the breaking of the railroad dike, though none had
a better view than the five railroad employees who were inspecting the dike
when it broke. That morning, they had
noticed parts of the track slumping a bit and ordered trains going over the
track to slow down. A bit later, a
housing authority employee noticed very muddy water in the Columbia River
Slough on the Vanport side of the dike.

The
dike was built over several years beginning in 1918. It’s purpose was to carry trains, but people thought
of it as a flood control structure. It was owned by the
Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway and looked its role. It was 75 feet tall and had a much bigger
base than other structures protecting Vanport.
Plus, people thought that the years of rail traffic had compacted the fills
in the dike. It had also stood up to
major floods in 1921, 1928 and 1933.

Suddenly,
at 4:17 PM, the Columbia River was pouring through the center of the railroad
bed, immediately opening a rip in the structure that rapidly grew. An aircraft piloted by a man named Calvin
Hubert saw a 50 foot gash in the structure that was growing by the second. Felix Baranovich was in Vanport at his record
shop and glanced up at the dike in time to see the break and he

began running
through the town alerting residents. He
ran past cars careening through the streets crazily to the safety of Denver
Avenue, the road atop a dike on the east side of Vanport. He saw people on top of the railroad dike who
didn’t seem particularly concerned, though they soon would be. Back in the air, Hubert saw the rip in the
dike extend to 500 feet in the first minute or so. The railroad inspectors on the dike were now
in the water.

Students
and professors from the Vanport Extension were removing their research papers
from the school when it happened. They became
the early warning system for residents.

Mostly, people tried to drive out, but the one road out was quickly clogged
with others driving to safety. A monster
traffic jam developed when public safety vehicles, good samaritans and gawkers
rushed to Denver Avenue just as residents were driving out. After 15 minutes, the warning sirens began to
blow.

It
was fortunate that the water rushing through the broken dike encountered the
Columbia River Slough on the Vanport side of the dike. The sloughs and lakes inside the project slowed
the water, absorbing its power and slowing its spread.

The
rescue was underway. As their houses bobbed
along in the water, people trapped inside could not find the exits and had to
be chopped out by rescuers. Others clung
to roofs, pieces of wood, utility poles, mattresses. By 9:00 PM, it seemed as if everyone was out
and most headed for some kind of temporary shelter. It seemed preposterous, but no bodies had
been found.

Five
players from the Portland Beavers baseball team lived in Vanport. The hapless Beavers were swept in a double
header by Seattle the day of the flood, falling to 19-39 on the season. Three of them hopped a plane to get home and
be with their families, all of whom were safe.
Where they landed is unknown, as Portland’s International Airport was
flooded and closed. The train station
was down as well. One of the old
Columbia River sternwheeler tugs was in the middle of the closed Interstate
Bridge, pushing against a support beam engineers feared was becoming unstable.

Then
the Denver Avenue dike began to give, first a small break, suddenly extending
several hundred feet. A utility worker
on the dike was caught in the break and disappeared while seated in his
car. No longer impounded, the

houses
began floating away, breaking up as they went, groaning and snapping in the
current. As the debris broke up further,
bodies were found in ones, twos and threes.
Lorena Smith was stuck in a pile of debris under water. Her husband, on top, struggled to get her out
and failed. Sally Butcher, 11 months and
her brother, Michael, two years, were found underwater in a crazily tipped
house. Mrs. Florence Beadle, 44, was
floating free. Those were the first
deaths reported by the Oregon Journal.
Fifteen dead and seven missing was the final count, though not a lot of
people in Vanport that day believed the numbers. Casualties seemed impossibly low.

In
Rachel Dresbeck’s book, Oregon Disasters,
she reports many rumors. A number of
people said that they had seen a bus full of kids knocked off the road and
sinking in the first minutes of the flood. Others believed that the kids
in the movie theater never got out. People
feared hundreds had been washed out to sea.
Another rumor had it that officials were using the nearby Terminal Ice
and Storage as a secret storage place for bodies. The City Council voted 3-2 to hold the Rose
Festival that year, though they had to move it to the eastside of town to avoid
the flood damage in the downtown.

Many
people at the time felt that the flood brought out the best in people and was a
good moment for the city’s race relations.
Thousands of homeless connected to people who took them in with little
regard for their race. The temporary school
shelters set up by the Red Cross were not needed by mid-week. Some went to tents in the backyards of
relatives, others to homes in the wealthy West Hills. An older black woman who had
spent the night walking, then sleeping, on the side of Denver Avenue with her
three grandchildren went up to a taxi driver and asked for water. He drove the family to his home, they would
stay a month, and returned to Denver Avenue where he offered free rides to
people who needed them.

After
the flood, nearly 18,000 people found temporary homes throughout Portland. A second
round of temporary homes, this time in the form of small trailers, were
controversial, as they were in Katrina, but finally there was something good to
wait for -- Portland was building new public housing and putting black people in those
houses – and they were in the city limits though the red lines around Albina,
largely held firm.

Portland City Club
has long been a consistent and honest voice about race in the city. It has recognized that feeling good about an
emergency response wasn't enough. And,
over many years, it pursued race in Portland with a restless
energy, not yet getting to what it truly wanted, but always going back to the
basic questions. The Club’s first effort was long before the flood,
articulating the need to repeal the racist elements of the state constitution
in 1926. In 1945 the Club published its first
comprehensive study, The Negro In
Portland, outlining the failures of the banking, lending, real estate,
education, employment and justice systems that had to be recognized and
addressed. In 1957 it offered a progress
report that expressed some optimism but also disappointment at how some areas, particularly housing, were not working for African Americans. In 1968, Martin Luther King’s assassination
led to rioting and the Club studied race and the justice system, in
1980 the schools, in 1991 and 1992 it revisited housing, justice, health and welfare systems.

In its
work, City Club has educated generations of young Portland leaders on what it
means to think about and try to stir action on the one of the hardest problems facing any
community.

An
agreement on joint US and Canadian action on the Columbia River was a direct
result of the Vanport flood, though the complexities made for a long wait. In 1964, Canada and the US signed a final version of the Columbia River Treaty. The agreement purchased flood control for 60 years by paying for three dams built on the Columbia in British Columbia. These dams also
provided water storage that generated electricity in US dams downstream, the
two countries splitting the value.
A group of utilities in the US purchased the Canadian share of electricity for 30 years and with it created the Pacific Northwest - California Electrical Intertie, a piece of
infrastructure providing seasonal exchanges between the regions. We grouse about sometimes, but it has provided tremendous value to the Pacific Northwest.

Flood control, in particular, has been extremely valuable to the region. Several events approaching the size of the
Vanport Flood have been averted because of the three Canadian dams built -- and Canadian citizens lived with.

Where
Vanport stood is now a golf course, the Portland International Raceway and
various parts of the Columbia River Slough.
Sixty five years after the flood it remains one of the powerful metaphors about race in Portland. The Portland City Club, about every ten years or so, struggles against one or another of its complexities.

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